Cowboy church spurs worship
FORT WORTH, Texas — At high noon in the Stockyards Station, just after the longhorn cattle drive down Exchange Avenue and just before the gunfight show, a congregation comes to worship.
Pastor George Westby has been leading services here at the Cowboy Church at the Fort Worth Stockyards for 23 years. His services attract visitors from all over the country as well as a handful of regulars.
But just off Exchange Avenue, down in the old horse-and-mule barn where there’s real manure and fewer vacationing families, a second cowboy church is here for the same reason.
The Cowtown Cowboy Church, led by pastor Sonny Miller, started meeting in spring 2013 on a dirt patch under the vaulted ceilings of the old stables.
The newer church is part of the Western Heritage Ministry of the Texas Baptists, a group of more than 200 churches statewide that embrace the Gospel with a little twang.
The fact that there are now two cowboy churches in the Fort Worth Stockyards is a sign of the times: Dozens of these churches have popped up in the last 15 years, constituting a rapidly growing constituency of new Western Christianity that embraces simple services over big-church productions.
Westby’s church is a nondenominational congregation with a relaxed, indoor service featuring lots of music and no formal sermon. Miller’s, meanwhile, is associated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas and has a focus on ministry that goes beyond Sunday morning.
The two pastors don’t conflict or compete: They say there are enough cowboys, or at least enough people who want to worship like a cowboy, in the Stockyards to go around.
“Talking to someone about religion is like talking about politics,” Miller said. “Talk to them about their horses and their spirituality, that’s what they connect with.”
Westby, who runs the parking operations at Billy Bob’s Texas and around the Stockyards, never intended to be a preacher. Two decades ago, at the annual Red Steagall Cowboy Gathering in the Stockyards, he and a small group of cowboys got together on Sunday morning.
“It was just an honest, pure worship service,” Westby said. He wondered why church couldn’t be that simple all the time.
The next week, the cowboys started meeting in the Stockyards Station, where they’ve met ever since. They never ask for money, Westby said, but an old, ragged cowboy hat sits by the door for donations that go to local charities.
The sanctuary is a small room with glass windows and brick floors, where the old sheep and hog pens used to be, “so you know we won’t get too fancy,” Westby said.
Westby’s church is one of the oldest of its kind in Texas. It was founded just as the cowboy church phenomenon started to take off.
Even as the nondenominational churches such as the Cowboy Church spread, the Baptist General Convention of Texas started its own cowboy churches.
In 2000, the Cowboy Church of Ellis County was founded as part of the Texas Baptists. By 2006, there were 55 cowboy churches under the Texas Baptists’ Western Heritage Ministry.
Today, the Texas Baptists count 220 cowboy churches in the state.
“It’s ‘come as you are,’” said Charles Higgs, director of the Western Heritage Ministry. “Boots, jeans, sandals, whatever.”
For the Baptists, a successful cowboy church isn’t just a Sunday service. They helped start the Cowtown Cowboy Church in the Stockyards, for example, in part to sponsor team roping and barrel racing events to attract more cowboys and cowgirls to their ministry without the pressure of a formal service.
“We’re not going to beat you down because you’ve got a pack of beer in the back of your truck,” said Mike White, an elder at the Cowtown Cowboy Church. “The most important thing is they’re in church, here as a family, hearing the word of God.”
Higgs said on any given Sunday, about 45,000 Texans worship in a cowboy church. There are also country churches — all the western style of a cowboy church without the livestock — and outdoor life churches that meet at stores such as Cabela’s.
